Founding Engineer

About the Role

This is a founding engineer opportunity at a three-person, Y Combinator–backed startup (Spring 2026 batch) building an AI-native financial research platform for the healthcare sector. The product uses AI agents to continuously convert disparate public and private data sources into always-updated, source-backed models of entire industries — starting with healthcare — for professional investors including banks, hedge funds, and asset managers.

You'll be one of the earliest technical hires, shaping the architecture, systems, and culture from the ground up. This role is for someone who wants deep ownership over a real product in production, not a slice of a large engineering org.

What You'll Do

• Work across the full stack — shipping frontend features, real-time systems, and backend infrastructure.

• Build data pipelines and internal tooling that enable analysts to add new sources and maintain sector coverage faster and more reliably.

• Improve agentic parsing and extraction systems, making AI agents more capable and reliable.

• Own work end-to-end: inspecting data, QA-ing what you build, instrumenting it, shipping it, and fixing it in production.

• Day one: Integrate a new information source into the platform.

• Week one: Ship a measurable improvement to the speed or reliability of agentic systems.

• Within 30 days: Build a company ontology and ship the first version of a core product feature (an earnings data center).

What We're Looking For

Must-Haves

• 2+ years building, shipping, and operating production systems end-to-end.

• Hands-on experience building and deploying agentic AI systems or LLM-based applications in production.

• Full-stack capability: backend systems, data pipelines, and frontend development.

• Python backend development with FastAPI or equivalent web framework.

• Data infrastructure and pipeline development (ETL, data modeling, SQL).

• TypeScript and React frontend development.

• Database design and optimization with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases.

• Production observability, monitoring, and debugging of distributed systems.

• AWS cloud infrastructure and deployment experience.

• Experience with real-time data systems and streaming updates.

• US citizenship required (no visa sponsorship available).

• Full-time commitment required.

Strong Judgment & Mindset

• Proven track record: you've built, shipped, and operated something real in production.

• Strong judgment about when AI agents should reason versus when deterministic software should take over.

• Experience orchestrating coding agents in parallel; genuinely excited about agentic workflows.

• Deep ownership mentality — you want responsibility for the whole result, not just your piece.

• Comfortable working across unfamiliar infrastructure, scaling problems, and the full stack.

Nice to Have

• Capital markets, financial research, or investment banking domain experience.

• Experience with modern data tools such as dbt, MotherDuck, or Turbopuffer.

• Cloudflare or edge computing infrastructure experience.

• Experience building tools and abstractions for AI/ML systems.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $156,000 – $182,000 per year

• Early equity stake as a founding team member

• Direct impact on product direction and company trajectory

Location

This role is on-site in New York, NY. The team works together in person. Remote work is not available for this position.

Visa sponsorship is not available. US citizenship is required.